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Always-On Internet Connection Required in Diablo III

Blizzard plans to store, authenticate every Diablo III character you create.

Citing cheating, not piracy, Blizzard has announced Diablo III will require players to be connected to the Internet at all times, including the single-player campaign.

Last week Ubisoft drew the ire of PC gamers when it announced its always-on Internet DRM technology would be making a return in the PC version of Driver: San Francisco. The publisher said its past use of the DRM had a significant impact on cutting piracy in the previous titles it was attached to and labeled the system a success.

Diablo III executive producer Rob Pardo told IGN the always-on Internet connection is being implemented to combat the horde of hackers and cheats that made Diablo II their own personal playground.

"In both Diablo and especially in Diablo II, I think the intuition for a lot of people when they're playing the game is, 'I want to make my character offline away from that scary Battle.net environment. And then once I have this powerful character, I'll jump online.' But the problem with that concept is we can't really detect if they're cheating," Pardo said.
"They might have the capability to hack their character, things like that, so at that point we can't really allow that character to be in the Battle.net environment. Then they're going to have to restart their character, which is exactly what happened in Diablo II, which was really unfortunate."

Players will be able to create up to 10 characters in Diablo III, and all of them will be stored on Blizzard's Battle.net servers.

Diablo III is in development for Windows PCs and Mac OS. The game's release date remains TBA.

Spy Guy says: I'm not buying it. This is an anti-piracy move, plain and simple, and Blizzard is simply trying to paint a pretty face on this strategy by saying it will allow them to combat cheating. There are plenty of proven ways to make sure new players play in an environment with other players of their level without requiring every single character created to be stored on the Battle.net servers. So, you guys let Ubisoft have it for its DRM tech, what's your reaction to Blizzard's decision?